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April 1, 2025
Musings on the author's past, his life as a writer, and recent cultural topics. Russo has done outstanding and widely acclaimed work in fiction (Empire Falls, Straight Man, the North Bath Trilogy) and has also written a strong memoir (Elsewhere), so a collection of personal essays written over the past several years sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea. But it would take a slightly different set of essays and more scrupulous pruning to produce the version of that book a devoted admirer might imagine. Not much of interest is left to say about the Covid-19 pandemic, and Russo says some of it more than once. "There was simply no definition ofessential worker broad enough to include a seventy-one-year-old novelist," he posits early on, noting in a later essay that "it's hard to argue that writers are essential workers." The notion that "writers use people," far from fresh and seemingly owned by Joan Didion, comes up in "Triage" and in later essays is deemed "probably worth saying again," twice. Is it really the right time for an essay framed around "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?" Which of Russo's parents was right about America? This is one of the themes of a long essay, "Marriage Story," that contains memoir material familiar to the author's many fans, and much of it is reprised in a thematically adjacent essay titled "Ghosts." On the other hand, those same readers are likely to enjoy Russo's observations about the genesis of his story "The Whore's Child" in "The Lives of Others," his take on the fraught question of whether we must only write what we know. As he explains, he felt closer to, and prouder of, his octogenarian nun character than to his seemingly more autobiographical middle-aged writer--and breaks down exactly why and how. Russo is quite a bit better than this collection would suggest, but completists will forgive him.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
March 21, 2025
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Russo's (Somebody's Fool) second essay collection focuses on writing and his life. He has written screenplays for a number of his books, including an HBO miniseries for Empire Falls. Reading about his childhood, youth, and early adulthood, growing up in a Rustbelt town in upstate New York as the son of an often-absent father and an ambitious mother, helps readers understand the source of his books' settings, their characters, and his (and their) outlooks on life. Thirteen essays (some of which originally appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association) reveal even more of Russo's background and interests--studying for his Ph.D. in literature at the University of Arizona, teaching English at Colby and other colleges, traveling across the country on book tours, screenwriting and adapting his own work. Russo also writes of his interest in Kingsley Amis's novel Lucky Jim, the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (and one of its stars, Paul Newman), and Townes Van Zandt's song "Pancho and Lefty." VERDICT A welcome visit with a major contemporary writer.--Marcia Welsh
Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
April 1, 2025
As he has done in the past, Russo returns to the personal essay to reflect on subjects of eternal fascination to himself and to his audience. The stuff of everyday life has proven richly inspirational throughout Russo's award-winning fiction, as careful readers of his beloved North Bath trilogy of novels can attest. His career, not only as a novelist, screenwriter, and memoirist, but also as a university professor, is brought into keen focus as he poses and answers essential questions regarding approach, point of view, and the permission structure behind storytelling. Russo may no longer live in the small upstate New York mill town that animated the setting for many of his novels, and the parents, grandparents, and townspeople who raised and nurtured him there may no longer be alive, but their collective impact remains a source of inquiry and mystification. Unsettled though many issues may be, Russo's commonsense resolution to these enduring episodes elevates the individuality of his response to a reassuring level of universality.
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